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DID MAN MAKE GOD 

OR 

DID GOD MAKE MAN 

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN STEINWAY HALL, CHICAGO, AND IN 
VARIOUS PLACES IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 

By JOHN P. D. JOHN 



BOOKLETS BY JOHN P. D. JOHN 



Printed on heavy laid deckle edge book paper 

Price of each^ bound in Tyrian Purple Princess^ jo cents 

In Art Vellum, 7J cents 



Booklet No. i •[ * 



Did Man Make God; or Did God Make Man? 

Now ready. 



The following will be issued later in uniform size, 
style and price: 

(The Worth of a Man. 
Booklet No. 2< Life a Mode of Death, or The Survival of the 
( Fittest. 

T^onK-T PT Nn 'x\ "^^^ Sublimity of a Great Conviction. 
BOOKLET JNO. 3 j xhe Overlap of Science and Religion. 



r Seeing Wit 

). 4-< Invisibl 

(Is There a 



Without Eyes, or The Vision of the 
Booklet No. 4-^ Invisible. 

Superhuman Thinker? 



Booklet No. 1 is now issued and will be sent postpaid to any 
address on receipt of the price by 

FRANK CALDWELL, Publisher 

929 Udell Street Indianapolis, Ind. 



Did Man Make God 

OR 

Did God Make Man 



A REPLY TO 

ROBERT G. INGERSOLL 



/ BY 

JOHN P. D. JOHN, D.D.,LL.D. 

EX- PRESIDENT OF DEPAUW UNIVERSITY 



INDIANAPOLIS 

FRANK CALDWELL, Publisher 

1898 



1 



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Copyright by Frank Caldwell 
1898 




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DID MAN MAKE GOD, 

OR 

DID GOD MAKE MAN? 

A REPLY TO ROBERT G. INGERSOLL. 

Ladies and Gentlemen: 

You cannot dispose of God by printing 
his name with a little g. He came before 
the printer. God is not determined by 
the size of his initial letter. He was al- 
ready in the universe when the alphabet 
appeared. He is the Alpha of all begin- 
nings and the Omega of all endings. The 
agnostic philosopher who supposes that 
God did not make his appearance until he 
was summoned by men is an eternity be- 
hind time. Somebody had been thinking 
in the universe a long while before men be- 
gan to think. Man himself was a thought 
before he was a thinker. He was a 
thought with which the Infinite Thinker 
had been busying himself since the time 

5 



Did Man Make God, or 



when the universe was young; and he is, 
and is to be, a thought with which the 
same Thinker will be concerned after the 
visible universe shall have become a rem- 
iniscence. That philosophy is equally an 
eternity ahead of time which unthrones Je- 
hovah with a 'witticism. A pun is mighty, 
but it is not almighty. It will make men 
laugh, but it will not transform them into 
creators of their Creator. Pope uttered a 
noble sentiment when he said: 

An honest man's the noblest work of God; 

but the eloquent orator of modern agnos- 
ticism scarcely improved upon it when he 
said: 

An honest god is the noblest work of man. 

You can neither reduce the Creator to 
the creature by ignoring the rules for cap- 
ital letters, nor exalt the creature into the 
Creator with a play of words. Grammat- 
ical devices are not logic, and wit is not 
argument. 

Which is the maker, man or God? 
Which is the creature, God or man? 
6 



Did God Make Man? 



The distinguished agnostic and eloquent 
orator whose philosophy I am to examine 
in this address says that man is the maker 
and God is the creature. The Bible says 
that God is the maker and man is the crea- 
ture. The one says that God made men in 
his image and after his likeness. The other 
says that men made God in their image and 
after their likeness. Which is right? 

I do not forget that every man has his 
own ideal of God, which differs with differ- 
ent men, and to that extent that every man 
makes his own God. So every man makes 
his own Pyramids of Egypt. But back of 
his ideal of the Pyramids there is the real- 
ity which is the basis of his ideal. And 
the question now is, whether back of every 
man's ideal of God there is a real being 
not made by men, and corresponding in 
some measure to the conception, or 
whether the God of the Bible is only a sub- 
jective ideal having no other existence than 
in the vagaries of men, whether of ancient 
or modern times. 

Let me quickly dispose of some prelim- 

7 



Did Man Make God, or 



inaries. I hasten to say that I am not here 
on a personal crusade. If any of you have 
come expecting to hear Mr. Ingersoll de- 
nounced as a blasphemer or to see his per- 
sonality displayed in any light, you are 
destined to disappointment. I am on a 
higher mission. He has put some fair ques- 
tions — I will not shrink from saying, some 
hard questions — to the defenders of the 
Christian faith. Most of them, I know, are 
old questions, and have been answered more 
or less satisfactorily in every generation 
from time immemorial ; yet they are always 
new and must be answered by every genera- 
tion yet to come. 

It will not answer these questions to call 
him a blasphemer. If he is right, he is 
not a blasphemer; for if there be no God 
but the gods made by men, there can be 
no such thing as blasphemy. To answer 
him by calling him a blasphemer is to beg 
the question. Fairly show him first to be 
one if you can, by throwing the light on his 
philosophy, and you will not need to call 
him names. His personality, his methods, 

8 



Did God Make Man? 



his spirit, have nothing to do with the mat- 
ter. Is he right or wrong? That is the 
question. To call him a bad man is not 
logic; it is cowardice. Logic is not con- 
cerned with the goodness or badness of 
the man ; it is concerned with the validity 
of his argument. Let him be a good man; 
that will not serve as a crutch for his logic, 
if it be lame. Let him be a bad man ; that 
will not make his logic limp, if it be sound. 
Let him be the devil himself; it will not 
ansv/er him to say: *'Sir, your questions 
are impertinent; and besides you are the 
devil and are not entitled to a reply." 
That is not the way Jesus met Satan in the 
wilderness. He met argument with argu- 
ment. Truth is in a sorry plight, if it must 
rest on epithets. It is old enough to stand 
alone. The truth is worth its face, though 
uttered by the devil; and sophistry does 
not become logic even in the mouth of a 
saint. Let us, therefore, not make faces 
at the man, but honestly, respectfully and 
fearlessly examine what he has to say. 
Further, the task before me is not self- 

9 



Did Man Make God, or 



imposed. I am not vain enough to imagine 
myself better fitted for the work than the 
distinguished men of this generation who 
have preceded me, including eminent cler- 
gymen, educators, jurists and statesmen. 
On the contrary, I shrink from the re- 
sponsibiliy in the consciousness of my in- 
adequacy to meet it. But I come at the 
bidding of my conscience upon the call of 
the young men of my country, whose Chris- 
tian faith has been obscured by the black 
clouds of doubt. Time and again I have 
been urged to accept the standing chal- 
lenge of the modern Giant of Gath, but I 
could not fight in Saul's armor, and I was 
not skilled with the sling. Young men 
have begged me, both for their own sakes 
and for the sake of their fellows, to defend 
the faith against the specific assaults of this 
brilliant agnostic. I have looked through 
the well thumbed books of our libraries, 
only to find marginal comments, in the 
handwriting of young men, sympathizing 
with the agnostic rather than with his crit- 
ics. The young men need help. If I can 

lO 



Did God Make Man? 



help them, I will no longer hold back. I 
will go out to meet the Philistine, not with 
sword or staves, nor yet with sling and 
pebbles, but solely, I believe, with the 
naked truth of God. 

I come, therefore, in the cause of young 
men whose sky is beclouded with doubt. I 
desire to help them. I do not come to tell 
them they are sinners because they are 
doubters. I do not hope to help them by 
saying that they have reached the callow 
stage when they think it is smart to doubt. 
God knows that some of them would give 
their right arm or their right eye if they 
could only get back the sweet faith of their 
childhood. God forgive the men who un- 
wittingly drive our precious youth deeper 
into doubt and despair by sneering at their 
callowness, or by calling in question the 
sincerity of their doubts. That is not the 
way Jesus spoke to Thomas. The man 
who doubts, doubts with the reason which 
God has given him; and I will insult 
neither man nor God by sneering at honest 
doubt. 

II 



Did Man Make God, or 



Still further, I make the admission in ad- 
vance that so far as the Bible is a human 
book, it is liable to human imperfections. 

It is printed by uninspired men, and be- 
fore the invention of printing it was tran- 
scribed by uninspired men. It may, there- 
fore, contain some human flaws. It was 
translated by uninspired men into lan- 
guages different from those in which it was 
originally written, and here again is a pos- 
sibility of human imperfections. Its various 
parts were gathered together by uninspired 
men ; and though almost superhuman care 
was taken, the result may have fallen short 
of perfection. Some things may have crept 
in that do not belong there, and other 
things may have been omitted that belong 
to the text. It was given originally, as 
Christians claim, to inspired men who saw 
the visions of revealed truth through human 
intellects, and who spoke or wrote the 
truth as fully as they saw it, and in language 
as well adapted to the task as their vocab- 
ularies could supply. Here again, though 
the precious truth came directly and super- 

12 



Did God Make Man? 



naturally from divine insight and inspira- 
tion, we cannot be sure that it has reached 
us precisely as it left the lips of God; be- 
cause it must, of necessity, come to us 
through human media. 

Now, turn every light of criticism upon 
the Bible. Turn on the light of nature; 
and if science shall discover anything that 
is contradicted by nature, take it out of 
the Bible, for God did not put it there. 
He did not put one thing in nature and 
another in the Book. But be very sure 
that what science seems to see is a fact; 
and then be even doubly sure that the fact 
does in reality collide with the Book. 

But do not stop with the light of nature. 
Turn upon the Bible the searchlight of the 
highest critcism, and if it shall surely ap- 
pear that there are human errors in the 
text, eliminate the error and preserve the 
truth. Some of the inexplicable mysteries 
of the Bible may lie in the imperfection of 
the human element, and the elimination of 
this imperfection may clear away the mys- 
tery. But in spite of all its possible imper- 

13 



Did Man Make God, or 



fections, there is no other standard book of 
approximately equal age so free from 
human flaw. 

Judge the Bible, not by an occasional 
inaccuracy or some apparent inconsisten- 
cies, but by the general sweep of its teach- 
ing. Astronomy tells us that the planets 
move around the sun from west to east; 
yet at times they seem to move backward 
from east to west. But this backward 
motion is not real; it is the fault of our 
standpoint of observation. The planets 
still move onward with steady march. 
Judge the planetary motion, not by what it 
seems now and then, but by the stretch of 
an entire orbit. Judge the current of a 
river, not by the eddies along the shore, 
but by the steady onflow of its waters to 
the sea. The occasional retrograde motion 
in the orbit of inspired truth is only ap- 
parent as seen from our eccentric human 
standpoint, and when the stream of truth 
seems to flow backward against gravitation 
it is only the eddy near the shore occa- 
sioned by some human impediment. 

H 



Did God Make Man? 



A peach tree does not bear crab apples 
when a few crab branches have been arti- 
ficially attached to its trunk. Judge a 
peach tree by the fruit that grows on its 
own branches, and not by the withered 
crabs that hang on a foreign branch. 
Judge the Bible by its legitimate fruit, and 
not by the bitter product of an artificial 
branch, whether attached to the trunk in 
ancient times by mistake, or in modern 
times by false interpretation. The Bible 
has vitality enough to yield its own appro- 
priate fruit, even after the parasites have 
sated their thirst upon its juices. Judge 
the Bible, not by the parasites that cling 
to its branches and suck at its vitality, but 
by its inmost life that reaches from root to 
fruit. Many of the seeming contradictions 
of the Bible will yet disappear in the light 
of candid criticism. 

Moreover, judge the Bible by what it 
proposes to do, and not by a foreign stand- 
ard artificially set up. The Bible came to 
teach men of human duty and human des- 
tiny — not to teach science, art, literature 

15 



Did Man Make God, or 



or philosophy. Mr. Ingersoll claims that 
God is opposed to art, science, education 
and liberty, because forsooth the Bible is 
not a good text-book in these subjects. 
On the same ground, Mr. Ingersoll must 
be opposed to the public schools, because 
there is not a word concerning the subject 
in his remarks at his brother's grave. He 
must be opposed to mathematics, because 
he does not call attention to the multiplica- 
tion table in his lecture on Shakespeare. 
He must be opposed to pure love and happy 
homes, because he does not work a love 
story into his lecture on Ghosts. Judge a 
funeral oration by what it says of death and 
the dead, and not by what it fails to say of 
educational systems. Judge a lecture on 
Shakespeare by what it says of Shakes- 
peare, and not by what it fails to say of 
mathematics. Judge an address on ghosts 
by what it says of ghosts, and not by what 
it omits saying of domestic life. Judge the 
Bible by what it says of duty and destiny, 
and not by what it fails to say of art, sci- 
ence, letters and philosophy. 

i6 



Did God Make Man? 



One more preliminary. The specific ob- 
jections brought by Mr. Ingersoll against 
the God of the Bible are numbered by 
scores, if not by hundreds. It is evident 
that I cannot examine them in detail. I 
shall, therefore, attempt to gather them all 
together in a few general classes and con- 
sider the classes rather than the individual 
objections. Some of his statements are 
foolish and frivolous. Some are not true; 
some are overdrawn; some contain half 
truths or unfair coloring of whole truths, 
and some are as true as the Gospel. He 
has said many beautiful things. His phi- 
losophy contains much that is helpful and 
elevating. It could not well be otherwise 
at those points in which it coincides with 
the philosophy of Jesus. But credit to 
whom credit is due. I wish that much of 
his inspiration concerning justice, human- 
ity, love and liberty might take possession 
of the people. I wish that his beautiful 
pictures of happy homes might in large 
measure become realities under every roof. 



17 



Did Man Make God, or 



And they will, when the philosophy of Jesus 
Christ shall universally prevail. 

I shall not stop to correct his specific 
misstatements, for they will fall of their 
own weight, if the heads under which I 
group his objections cannot stand. And 
now I come to the work before me. 

^* ^C ^? #j% 5|* 

Mr. Ingersoll claims that the Christian 
religion and its reputed Author were both 
man-made, and are, therefore, no better 
than the men who made them. 

He objects to the alleged Author of the 
Bible on the ground that, like the men who 
made him, he is ignorant^ savage^ cruel^ 
unjust^ immoral^ inconsistent and unfaithful; 
and, as I have already intimated, that he 
is opposed to art^ science^ education^ progress 
and liberty. 

He objects to the Christian system on 
the broad ground that it is unscientific — 
that is, having been made by unscientific 
men, the Christian scheme is contrary to 
fact, unnatural, superstitious and unadapted to 
the task which it proposes. 

i8 



Did God Make Man? 



In order to gain time, I will throw all 
these objections against God and his Book 
into two general groups, which, I think, 
will be all inclusive — viz., moral objections 
against his character^ and intellectual ob- 
jections against his revelation. That is, Mr. 
Ingersoll objects to the character of God 
as set forth in the Scriptures on the ground 
that it is offensive to the nineteenth century- 
conscience, and he objects to his revela- 
tion on the ground that it is incompatible 
with nineteenth century intelligence. 



First, then, the objection to Jehovah 
himself on moral grounds. Here it is in a 
w^ord: He is cruel^ for he sent fire, flood, 
famine and pestilence to man and beast and 
left them to perish in horrible tortures; 
and, moreover, he has made possible a 
future helL He is savage^ for he com- 
manded his agents to give no quarter to 
prisoners of war. He is unjust^ for he 

19 



Did Man Make God, or 



allowed the innocent to suffer and perish 
with the guilty. He is immoral^ for he 
established and upheld slavery. He is par- 
tial^ for he '* killed Uzzah for putting forth 
his hand to steady the ark/' but forgave 
''David for murdering Uriah." He is 
unfaithful^ for he made promises which he 
did not keep. 

I will stop right here long enough to deny 
specifically this assertion, and challenge a 
single clear case in which God failed to 
meet his part of the contract according to 
the conditions ; and I stop still further to 
deny specifically the charge of partiality — 
namely, that God ever varied his govern- 
ment for different individuals, the circum- 
stances being alike. He is a respecter of 
conditions, but not of persons. 

Such, then, are the charges against the 
moral character of Jehovah. Therefore, 
the God of the Hebrews is only man-made ; 
he was only a subjective existence in the 
minds of the men who made him and who 
were like him; and he is only a subjective 
existence in the minds of the superstitious 

20 



Did God Make Man? 



one-third of mankind, who at present hap- 
pen to be the most intelligent, enlightened 
and civilized people on the globe. 

Now, in my first stricture on the charge 
of God's moral obliquity, I wish to be 
clearly understood, and not to be held as 
claiming for it more than is warranted. Let 
us for the moment assume Jehovah to be a 
reality. He is, then, by hypothesis, the 
God of nature as well as of revelation. But 
nature is not a dead issue. It is a present 
fact, and has been a fact facing the history 
of the past; a history accepted by agnostic 
as well as Christian. What does history 
say? What does our own observation de- 
clare? They declare that nature seems to 
be savage^ for it gives no quarter; that it 
seems to be cruel^ for it leaves man and 
beast to writhe in untold torture from fire, 
famine, pestilence and flood ; that it seems 
to be unjust^ for the innocent sujffer with 
the guilty ; that it seems to be partial^ for 
it helps the strong and opposes the weak; 
that it seems to be unfaithful^ for it kindles 
hopes which are never realized; that it 

21 



Did Man Make God, or 



seems to be immoral^ for by the law of the 
survival of the fittest the weak become the 
slaves of the strong. 

Now I know that it does not answer one 
question to ask another, and it does not 
repel one charge to make a counter one. 
But if the apparent moral obliquity of the 
God of nature is reconcilable with the moral 
rectitude which we demand that he must 
possess, then all similar moral objections to 
the God of the Bible must disappear. This 
does not prove the God of the Bible to be 
a reality, but simply that he is equally pos- 
sible with the God of nature, and that with- 
out moral obliquity. If nature can have a 
God whose infinite perfection is not irrec- 
oncilable with its stern realities, the same 
is true of the Bible. But nature is a fact; 
and if it has a governor, his character must 
be in harmony with his government, how- 
ever inexplicable and irreconcilable it may 
appear. Therefore, the God of the Bible 
may be a fact and yet be morally upright. 

The only value of my argument is this: 
It does not throw upon the Christian the 

22 



Did God Make Man? 



entire onus of reconciling the facts with 
the character of God, but throws the onus 
equally on all who witness the course of 
nature. The agnostic as well as the Chris- 
tian must face the difficulty; and if the 
agnostic can effect a reconciliation, it is 
equally a reconciliation for the Christian. 
If the agnostic is helpless, let him not ex- 
pect of the Christian what he cannot do 
himself. Let him not demand more of the 
God of the Bible, if there be one, than he 
demands of the God of nature, if there be 
one. Let him not close his eyes on nature, 
while he opens them on the Bible. Let him 
not ignore the beam in nature's eye, while 
he is discovering the mote in the eye of 
revelation. Either let him join with the 
Christian in trying to find some common 
ground of reconciliation, or let him take 
down his challenge. If neither he nor the 
Christian can reconcile the apparent moral 
contradictions, they are both in the same 
predicament; but the unexplained facts 
still remain in the one case precisely as in 
the other. And if nature is, in spite of the 

23 



Did Man Make God, or 



apparent contradiction, so may the God of 
the Hebrews be, in spite of any unanswered 
questions. 

If the agnostic shall answer, ''I will not, 
even for the sake of argument, admit the 
existence of the God of the Bible or the 
God of nature,'* the case is unaltered; for 
he is still under as great obligation to ex- 
plain the cruelties and savageries of nature, 
there being no God, as is the Christian to 
explain the savageries and cruelties of the 
Bible, there being a God. If he say, ''I 
cannot explain it,'* then let him take off 
his hat to the Christian. If he say, '*I do 
not need to explain it," then let him take 
back his gauntlet. If he say, *' Nature is 
a great machine that has been grinding 
from eternity, and will go on grinding to 
eternity, and there is no sentiment in a 
machine," I throwback into his face the 
ever-present savageries and cruelties of 
nature from which he cannot escape, senti- 
ment or no sentiment, God or no God; and 
I demand either a reason or a retreat. 

I do not say that this relieves the diffi- 

H 



Did God Make Man? 



culty; it only makes the agnostic share it. 
It does not answer the perplexing and 
unwelcome questions that have come alike 
to the devout Christian and the honest 
skeptic, but it puts them both under equal 
obligation to search for the answer. Na- 
ture is, in spite of all contradictions. The 
God of both nature and the Bible may be, 
in spite of all irresolvable difficulties. 

Let us now squarely face the alleged 
moral obliquity of Jehovah. I am not here 
to dodge hard questions; and I freely 
admit that this question, asked in all ages 
and by all men, and emphatically renewed 
by Mr. Ingersoll, is a very hard one. It 
has been answered time and again, but it 
will not stay answered. Do what we may, 
it will spring up before us when we think 
we have buried it once for all. 

The final answer to this question is the 
answer of faith rather than of sight. An- 
alogy teaches that we must expect unrecon- 
ciled and apparently irreconcilable contra- 
dictions in the government of God. Such 
contradictions abound everywhere, from the 

25 



Did Man Make God, or 



atom to the universe; and bold beyond ex- 
pression must be the man who presumes to 
pass final judgment upon the Infinite God. 
Mr. IngersoU criticises Judge Black for 
saying that we cannot rejudge the justice 
of God. If Judge Black means that we are 
not to pass provisional judgments upon the 
character of God, then I sympathize with 
Mr. IngersoU's criticism. But if he means 
that we cannot pass final judgment on the 
character of God, he is right in saying that 
we cannot rejudge his justice, even though 
the visible part of Jehovah's government 
may seem to contradict his justice. 

How utterly preposterous, that the finite 
should pass final judgment on the infinite, 
when it sees but one of the countless phases 
of the infinite! You dare not judge the 
finite so, much less the infinite. 

The man who sees but one thing sees 
nothing; for he cannot tell what his vision is 
like. The man who knows but one thing 
knows nothing; for he cannot tell what his 
knowledge is like. You cannot fully see a 
thing until you see how other things ap- 

26 



Did God Make Man? 



pear. You cannot fully know a thing until 
you know its relations to other things. You 
cannot know an atom until you know where 
it is in the universe, and how it affects and 
is affected by the rest of the universe. A 
momentary glance at any phase of history 
shows nothing. It shows much that mis- 
leads, but it reveals nothing which is de- 
cisive; for the truth of any moment is pro- 
jected backward and forward into other 
truth. It is a part of the truth from which 
it springs and equally a part of the truth 
into which it leads. 

I saw a mother force her fever-stricken 
child into a bath of cold water. He cried 
with pain, but she was relentless. His 
teeth chattered, and his frame shook in 
agony, but she was inexorable. O, cruel 
mother! Have you no love for your child? 
Have you no pity? Have you no chord of 
tenderness that vibrates at his helpless cry? 
I looked a second time, and lo, the fever 
had fled, and the child was well again. Was 
it cruelty that shut the mother's ears 
against the pleadings of her suffering child, 

27 



Did Man Make God, or 



or was it love? I saw a father take his 
helpless babe that was choking to death, 
and deliberately hold its gasping mouth be- 
fore a hot jet of hissing steam. O, mons- 
trous savage! O, inhuman wretch! Is it 
not enough that your innocent babe must 
suffer its own tortures; and must you in its 
very death struggles add to the horrors of 
its pain? I listened, and lo, the gasping 
ceased, the breath of health returned, and 
the father delivered the smiling babe into 
its mother's arms. Was it savagery that 
possessed that father, or was it love? 

Now, I say again, a momentary glance 
at any stage of history is worthless. Take 
an instantaneous photograph of the world 
as it is at this moment. What right have 
you to pass final judgment on such a scene? 
Cut right through the flow of the world's 
life, and hold up the cross-section thus 
made. What do you see? Absolutely 
nothing that you can depend upon. A 
beggar has stolen his way into a royal pal- 
ace, and at this moment is sitting by stealth 
upon the throne ; but is the beggar a king? 

28 



Did God Make Man? 



The king has disguised himself in rags and 
is begging at the cathedral door; is the 
king a beggar? Virtue is in the haunts of 
vice; has virtue fallen? Vice is seen at 
holy shrines; has vice reformed? It is the 
moment when the good man has evil 
thoughts, and the bad man pure thoughts; 
the moment when chastity is wrestling 
with the tempter, and licentiousness is 
listening to conscience. It is a moment, 
like all other moments, when some parts of 
the world are turned upside down and in- 
side out; and the man who judges the 
world by instantaneous and cross-section 
views is unworthy the respect of thinking 
men. And if you cannot conclusively judge 
the finite by a partial view, how shall you 
thus judge the infinite? 

I say, the final answer to the charge of 
God's alleged moral hideousness is the 
answer of faith, rather than of sight. 
*' Shall not the Judge of all the earth do 
right?'' Here we finally leave the difii- 
culty, whatever we may do with it in the 
meantime, for strange as his ways may ap- 

29 



Did Man Make God, or 



pear when we see them with partial vision, 
we rest confidently in the assurance that a 
wider vision would make all things plain. 
He has shown us enough of his love and his 
infinite perfections in the complete sweep 
of his progressive revelation to justify our 
faith that the exceptions are only apparent, 
and that they may be reconcilable in a 
fuller vision. 

Nevertheless, this view should not deter 
us from making honest attempts to account 
for the terrible visitations and strange pun- 
ishments permitted and even ordered by 
Jehovah in the early history of the race. I 
will put them in two classes: 

1. Those instances in which God made 
use of natural agents for the destruction of 
the people, such as the deluge^ the rain of 
fire^ the pestilence and the like. 

2. Those instances in which punish- 
ments and death were inflicted through 
human agency by his command. 

I. First, then, is God's use of natural 
agents to destroy human life inconsistent 
with his alleged infinite perfections? I will 

30 



Did God Make Man? 



make short work of this objection. Life is, 
by hypothesis, the gift of God in trust. It 
is not an absolute gift, for sooner or later 
every man must return it. With the ex- 
ception of those now living, the countless 
millions of human beings have surrendered 
that gift, and those now living and those 
who are yet to live will, in like manner, re- 
turn the trust of life to the Giver. The 
most refined ideals of justice demand that 
a trust once accepted, must be surrendered 
according to its terms, and that the be- 
stower of such a trust may of right deter- 
mine the conditions of its bestowal. 

But right here my agnostic friend calls 
me to a halt. He retorts that he never 
accepted the trust; that he was not con- 
sulted about it; that it was thrust on him 
without his knowledge or consent, and that 
it is an injustice to make him a compulsory 
party to the transaction. 

I reply that, whether he was consulted 
or not, he has most formally and irrevoc- 
ably accepted the terms of the trust. 
From the moment he was old enough to 

31 



Did Man Make God, or 



think at all about the matter he has tacitly 
accepted the trust and stoutly claimed all 
the advantages arising therefrom. Suppose 
you approach him with doubled fists and 
say, *'My dear sir, I appreciate your em- 
barrassing situation in having the trust of 
life forced upon you without your knowl- 
edge and consent, and I am now going to 
relieve you of the embarrassment by taking 
from you the life which you never accepted 
and which you still refuse to accept.'* 
What does he do? He doubles his fists in 
reply, and proceeds to protect himself 
against your well meant endeavors to re- 
lieve him from an embarrassing situation 
which he never accepted. When he falls 
sick, and the fever begins to foreclose the 
terms of his unwelcome and unaccepted 
trust, he sends for the best physician in 
town and begs him to prolong the life for 
which he never asked. He puts a light- 
ning-rod on his house, just as you or I 
would do; and when the cyclone comes, he 
takes refuge in the cellar precisely as does 
the man who has accepted the trust of life. 

32 



Did God Make Man? 



As long as men accept the life that has 
come to them unsought, as long as they 
continue to breathe God's air, to eat God's 
bread, to delight in God's sunshine, as long 
as they consent to live on his bounty, hu- 
man life is a trust as sacred as if it had been 
originally sought from the hand of God. 

This answers, once for all, the objections 
against the character of God founded on 
his visitations of pestilence^ fire and flood. 
Death is a law of nature, a law ordained 
and executed by God, whether it occur on 
pillows of down or on the wild wastes of 
the deluge; whether it occur by slow and 
painful approaches or by the sudden rain of 
fire from heaven. And God is as much 
responsible for the ordinary as for the ex- 
traordinary death ; for the law of death is 
God's law, and we cannot relieve him of 
responsibility by placing the law between 
him and the death bed. If he made the 
law, he is directly responsible for its action ; 
as much so as if by an immediate and di- 
rect exercise of his omnipotence he should 
stretch forth his arm in every case. 

33 



Did Man Make God, or 



It avails nothing to say that much of the 
death in the floods and pestilences was 
premature. Who is to determine whether 
any death is premature, the giver of life or 
the receiver? **But innocent babes went 
down under the waters. *' Do not innocent 
babes in vastly greater numbers go down 
under the fires of fever? If death be pre- 
mature when it occurs before life has 
reached its maximum vigor, then nearly all 
the death in the world is premature. Charge 
not this prematureness upon the extraor- 
dinary visitations of God, but upon his 
ordinary plan. Indeed, if justification be 
needed, we can more easily justify his extra- 
ordinary than his ordinary proceeding. For 
in nearly every case, the extraordinary 
visitation came after due warning and 
might have been prevented by the victims 
themselves. Nothing, therefore, remains 
of the objections to God's extraordinary 
visitations oi pestilence^ fire^ storm and flood, 

2. But, further, what of the savageries 
of war carried on by men under his sanction 
and command^ or the cases of individual 

34 



Did God Make Man? 



destruction of life and deprivation of property 
and liberty by human agency under his direct 
order? What of the wholesale slaughter of 
prisoners, including not only able-bodied 
soldiers, but helpless old men and women 
and harmless, innocent children? What of 
the forcible expulsion of the Canaanites and 
the seizure of their lands and products 
without returning an equivalent? What of 
the reduction to abject slavery of those who 
escaped death? In a word, what of that 
long series of acts committed by Israel 
under direct divine command — acts which 
men dare not commit against their fellows 
without being guilty of oppression, rob- 
bery and murder? 

The only new element in this case, com- 
pared with the case of fire, flood, pesti- 
lence and the like, is the reflex influence on 
the men who acted as the agents of God in 
the infliction of pain, the confiscation of 
property and the destruction of life. Here 
is the criticism in this case: will it tend to 
increase their respect for the rights of their 
fellows, whether in life or property, to 

35 



Did Man Make God, or 



despoil them of these rights continually; 
and will it serve to make them more law- 
abiding by constantly violating their own 
laws in their dealings with others? This 
reflex effect on Israel and other observers 
is the only new item in the case. 

For, life being a trust, all its content is 
equally a trust, including possessions of all 
kinds. A man has a right to that which he 
holds in trust — a right against all comers, 
except against those under whom he holds 
the trust. He has a right to his life against 
the attacks of his fellow-men. He has a 
right to his property against the robbery of 
his fellows. He has a right to the fruits of 
his labor against the oppression of slavery 
by a human master. All these rights are 
inalienable against the approaches of his 
fellow-men; but they are not inalienable 
against the Giver or givers of the trust. A 
deed to a farm makes a man impregnable 
against his fellow, but not against God, 
who permits him to hold the farm in trust. 
The evidence that any product is the work 
of one's own hand is sufficient against all 

36 



Did God Make Man? 



claims by his fellow-man, but it is of no 
avail against the claim of God, who gave 
him in trust the power of producing. The 
possession of life is sacred against the plans 
of one's fellow-man, but not so against the 
plans of Him who bestowed the life in 
trust. 

Society may for its own protection de- 
prive a man of these rights, each and all, 
when the exercise of the right becomes 
destructive of society itself. Society may 
deprive him of life, if its own existence de- 
mand it. It may confiscate his property in 
self-defense. It may take away his liberty 
to preserve its own. Society accomplishes 
these ends through its authorized agents, 
who are in no manner responsible for the 
deed. The deed is that of society, and not 
of the agent. Neither the judge who pro- 
nounces sentence of death nor the execu- 
tioner who touches the electric button is a 
murderer; the warden of the prison is not a 
task-master, and the sheriff who seizes the 
debtor's property is not a highway robber. 
Society authorizes these agents to act in 

37 



Did Man Make God, or 



its behalf, and the real actor is society 
itself. 

Now, if society can delegate to its offi- 
cers the power to deprive citizens of what 
would otherwise have been their rights, 
shall not the Maker of heaven and earth be 
permitted to do the same? If society can 
determine what method of capital punish- 
ment shall prevail — whether the offender 
shall be hung, shot, decapitated or swiftly 
dispatched by the electric shock, shall not 
the Almighty determine his method of exe- 
cution, whether by natural agencies or by 
human agents? 

I repeat, then, the only new element in 
the case of human instrumentality as com- 
pared with the instrumentality of flood, fire 
and storm is the effect of the method on 
the human agents themselves. They were 
the officers of God, as much as the execu- 
tioner is the officer of society, and they 
acted under his order. If they had acted 
on their own authority, they would have 
been tyrants, oppressors, task-masters, rob- 
bers and murderers. They would have 

38 



Did God Make Man? 



been flagrant violators of their own laws, 
which forbade all these crimes. But they 
were the directly constituted agents of God 
to execute orders which he had a right to 
give. The ancient Canaanites were 
doomed. They had to be exterminated, 
root and branch. And for two reasons — 
first, directly because of their sins, which 
were so beastly and outrageous as to be 
unnamable here; and second, indirectly, 
lest if they remained Israel should fall into 
the same bestialities. And this they did 
in every instance in which they failed to 
act as God's agents to exterminate the pos- 
sessors of the land. The Canaanites must 
go, and the God who gave them both their 
lives and possessions in trust must deter- 
mine the manner of their going. He can 
send fire and pestilence, as in other in- 
stances, or he can commission men as his 
agents to expel them. 

But if the land of Canaan must be set 
apart for the children of Israel, why did not 
God drive out the Canaanites by storm, 
pestilence or other natural agency, instead 

39 



Did Man Make God, or 



of educating Israel in the cruelties of war, 
the savageries of blood and the horrors of 
slavery? He had a right, we all admit, to 
destroy the Canaanites, even though they 
had been righteous; for sooner or later 
they must all go down under God's uni- 
versal law of death. Whether by one 
means or another, it was still God's act. 
No less, then, had he the right to destroy 
them because of their unparalleled and un- 
namable wickedness, and to make room for a 
people over whom he had kept providential 
watch for centuries, and whom by a long 
process of education he was preparing to 
be the medium of a great revelation to 
mankind. 

But why destroy the Canaanites by 
human hands rather than by some great 
convulsion of nature? What had war and 
slavery, with their unspeakable horrors, 
to do with Israel's education for a high and 
holy mission? Why this long and painful 
process of education? Why did not God, 
with whom a miracle is so easy, says Mr. 
IngersoU, make Israel at once what he 

40 



Did God Make Man? 



wanted them to be, and be done with it? 
Simply because he could not. God can 
make sticks and stones the way he wants 
them, and so they will remain; but he can- 
not make two and two five, for then it 
would no longer be two and two. He can 
take two things and two more things, and 
by his omnipotence produce five things, but 
the five things are not the two and two 
things, and omnipotence cannot make it 
so. He cannot make parallel lines meet, 
for they would no longer be parallel. He 
cannot make men virtuous against their 
wills, for they would no longer be men. 

Moreover, education everywhere is a 
process of steps, and not a sudden bridging 
of extremes. And God himself does not at 
a single stroke make roses of buds, trees of 
saplings, or men of babes. If the agnostic 
is willing to give nature unlimited time in 
which to develop a savage from a lower 
animal, he ought not to begrudge the God 
of nature a few hundred years in accom- 
plishing a mightier task. For I do not hesi- 
tate to say that the gulf between an animal 

41 



Did Man Make God, or 



and a savage is not so wide or so difficult 
to bridge as the gulf between the 
Hebrew freedman as he emerged from 
centuries of unmitigated slavery and the 
intelligent, pure and holy man, toward 
which Christian civilization is now tending, 
and which is but the continued unfolding 
of God's ancient plan of education. The 
agnostic is firing into his own guns when 
he finds fault with God for following the 
same plan in revelation that he follows in 
nature — namely, the plan of evolution — the 
plan of steps instead of leaps. 

But why this evolution through the hor- 
rors of war and slavery, rather than through 
the agency of insensitive means, such as 
natural agents? This is the old question, 
made new by the rhetoric of Mr. Ingersoll. 
Will it soften the savage hearts of Israel to 
redden their hands with human blood? Will 
it give them a higher conception of the 
sacredness of human life to destroy it by 
wholesale? Will it increase their respect 
for the rights of others to liberty to make 
slaves of their fellows? Will it serve to 

421 



Did God Make Man? 



illustrate the inalienable right of a man to 
the product of his own hand and brain to 
take it away by force? How are you going 
to educate a man to be law abiding by com- 
pelling him to be a constant violator of the 
law? That is the agnostic's question. 

And here again I say that the final an- 
swer to this question, as to the one pre- 
ceding, is the answer of faith. We cannot 
see enough of the universe to say that 
God's plan in this regard was not best. But 
we can see enough to say that God will do 
right, and that it is sufficient evidence of 
the wisdom of any plan to know that it is 
the plan of God. 

Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see 
how even the horrible spectacle of oppres- 
sion, slavery and war might serve to lift 
Israel more rapidly and surely toward a 
better and higher development. It served 
to teach them most effectually the heinous- 
ness of sin; and God's choice of them to 
execute his laws against the Canaanites, 
steeped as they were in unutterable wicked- 
ness, kept constantly before their gaze the 

43 



Did Man Make God, or 



inviolability of his law. If the reeking 
sword and the clanking chain are so hor- 
rible, what must be the sinfulness of sins 
that call forth the sword and chain ! Israel 
was confronted with a continuous object 
lesson showing the heinousness of sin in 
the eyes of God. The hangman may blunt 
his sensibilities by the frequency of his 
work, but his respect for law and his ab- 
horrence of crime will only grow deeper as 
the years go on. Israel well knew that 
what they did as the agents of Jehovah 
they could not do as individuals without 
violating the very laws which, as agents, 
they were enforcing. God was not train- 
ing them as murderers and taskmasters, 
but he was training them to hate murder 
and slavery. Society is not training the 
judge and the executioner in murder, or the 
prison officer in oppression, but it delegates 
them to show to the people the majesty 
and sacredness of law. And even at this 
long distance from those ancient horrors, we 
exclaim: **How great must be God's ab- 
horrence of sin, if he will make men as 

44 



Did God Make Man? 



well as nature his agents for its punish- 
ment/* 

Ancient Israel had been slaves for cen- 
turies. They came out of their bondage 
debased, ignorant, sensual, animal, brutal; 
and God simply had to do the best he 
could with them. He could not train them 
by the methods he would use under the 
civilization of the nineteenth century. God 
was compelled to *'wink at their ignor- 
ance,'* and adapt his methods to their 
capacity. You cannot train a lion by the 
methods of a lamb. Love, confidence, 
tenderness and the like, all have their place 
in education; but there must be some- 
thing in those to be educated to respond to 
these sentiments, or education will be a 
failure. Physical force in a den of lions is 
safer than affectionate caresses. Love may 
look into the viper's eyes only to receive 
its death wound. Education can proceed 
only in harmony with environment. A 
magnet will not lift a feather, though it 
will lift a ton of steel. The feather does 
not know the magnet. Ancient Israel did 

45 



Did Man Make God, or 



not know beauty, tenderness and lofty sen- 
timent, and God could not do otherwise 
than begin with them where they were, and 
adapt his methods of education to their 
feeble capacity for truth. 

Thus disappear all the moral objections 
against the God of the Bible in his deal- 
ings with men in this world. 

But Mr. Ingersoll raises his chief objec- 
tion against the moral character of God 
because of his proposed dealings with men 
in the world to come. He hates hell, he 
says; and so do I; but neither of us can 
hate it out of existence. If hate were an 
exterminator, how many things you and I 
would exterminate this very moment! I 
hate murder, treachery, oppression, rob- 
bery, tyranny, slavery, sin, but here they 
are in spite of my hate. Hell is already 
here. Men do not need to wait for the 
hereafter to encounter its flames. The 
majority of mankind are already in its 
fires. But the hell of the future is not the 
one depicted in such lurid color by the 
rhetoric of Mr. Ingersoll, and long ago 

46 



Did God Make Man? 



rejected by intelligent Christians. There 
is no hell, here or hereafter, other than 
that whose flames are kindled by the law of 
sowing and reaping. That is the hell of 
science as well as of the Bible. *' Whatso- 
ever a man soweth, that shall he also reap, * * 
is the verdict of science as well as of rev- 
elation. Hell has already come into the 
universe, because sin has come; and it 
will stay as long as sin endures. Why sin 
came, I do not know; neither does the 
agnostic; but it is here. A fact is a fact, 
whichever way it looks, and sin and hell 
are facts. 

Mr. Ingersoll says that he will not be- 
lieve in a God who has made hell possible. 
He prefers to go to hell, rather than live in 
heaven with such a God. Does he refuse 
to believe in nature, which has made the 
Chicago fire possible; and when the con- 
flagration breaks out in that city, does he 
take the first train to Chicago that he may 
burn in its flames, rather than dwell in the 
heaven of his happy home, under the smiles 



47 



Dip Man Make God, or 



of nature which has made possible such a 
conflagration? 

The Gordian knot which we are to untie 
is the present hell, rather than the future 
one. Sin and suffering are already here ; 
and as long as sin remains, suffering must 
remain. The Christian is under no more 
obligation to account for the present hell 
than is the agnostic ; for God or no God, 
the world is already in its flames. And 
whoever accounts for the hell on earth will 
equally account for the hell to come; for 
they are both, alike, the outcome of the law 
that sin and suffering cannot be divorced in 
this world or in any other. The fires of 
hell cannot go out until sin disappears from 
the universe. Mr. Ingersoll exalts science, 
but science proclaims that hell must be 
eternal, if sin be eternal. 

Thus all the moral objections against 

Jehovah vanish, whether they relate to his 

government here or hereafter. 

* * * ^ 



48 



Did God Make Man? 



II 

There remain now to be considered the 
intellectual objections against the revela- 
tion of God. I may put all the alleged 
intellectual shortcomings of the Bible under 
one general charge, namely, that it is un- 
scientific. It is unscientific because, as 
alleged, // is not in harmony with well 
known facts of science^ it is unnatural^ it is 
superstitious, and // is not adapted to the work 
it proposes to accomplish. 

If any of these specifications be true, the 
Bible scheme is, without doubt, to that 
extent unscientific. But what are the facts? 

I. First, does the Bible conflict with any 
known facts of science! 

Mr. Ingersoll claims, as the chief in- 
stance, that the Mosaic account of creation 
is not in harmony with the facts of modern 
science. Now, if it can be clearly shown 
that Moses made a mistake in his brief 
history of the origin of the universe, he was 
not inspired by an omniscient God. But 

49 



Did Man Make God, or 



if it shall appear that his account, as far as 
understood, agrees with the facts, as far as 
understood, this alone would be overwhelm- 
ing proof that he must have been super- 
naturally inspired. For the best astronom- 
ical, geological and biological knowledge 
of the age contemporaneous with Moses 
was a chaotic mass of ignorance. If Moses 
gave an account of the creation which does 
not conflict with what modern science 
knows about the matter, it was more than 
any of his contemporaries could have done; 
and if his account shall yet be found to be 
in harmony with future discoveries of sci- 
ence, it is an achievement which the his- 
torians in the blaze of the nineteenth century 
cannot accomplish. Nothing short of 
omniscient inspiration could have prevented 
a historian of three thousand years ago 
from falling into humiliating and stupen- 
dous blunders, if he undertook to describe 
the creation of the worlds. If he speak of 
astronomy, all the mathematics, physics 
and chemistry of the approaching centu- 
ries will throw their light upon his declara- 

50 






Did God Make Man? 



tions. He had not dreamed of the tele- 
scope or spectroscope, and yet they will 
find him out, if he make the slightest mis- 
take concerning the remotest star. If he 
speak of geology, and make the least devia- 
tion from the facts, the upturned strata of 
the coming centuries will witness against 
him. If he speak of the origin of life, the 
microscope will search among the atoms 
for a blunder. 

The history of science, like the record of 
all things human, has been, in part, a his- 
tory of mistakes, and in further part, a 
history of the correction of these mistakes 
by making new ones. The foremost scien- 
tist in any generation, past or present, 
cannot fully write the science of his next 
generation, much less that of a hundred 
generations to come. If the account of 
Moses, as far as it goes, does not conflict 
with what the nineteenth century knows of 
the origin of the universe, it was more than 
a human history. 

I do not forget or ignore what the higher 
criticism has to say of the Mosaic records. 

SI 



Did Man Make God, or 



But whatever may finally be the outcome of 
the higher criticism, one thing remains: 
somebody wrote those records ; and another 
thing equally remains : whoever wrote them 
anticipated in a remarkable way the science 
of the nineteenth century. Moses gives an 
account of the creation in progressive 
stages which, so far as understood, are in 
harmony with the latest declarations of 
science. The science of the past few cen- 
turies has, time and again, collided with 
Moses, but in certain instances it has 
appeared either that science itself, in that 
regard, was wrong, and Moses was right, 
or that a legitimate interpretation of Moses 
did not conflict with the certainties of 
science. 

One of the glaring inconsistencies in the 
Mosaic account which science could not 
reconcile and which troubled the candid 
inquirer was the creation of light before 
the sun. Light came during the first stage, 
while the sun did not appear till the fourth 
stage. I do not know that Mr. IngersoU 
directly speaks of this, but his predecessors 

52 



Did God Make Man? 



have pointed to this apparent absurdity in 
derision. 

If you and I had written an account of 
the creation three thousand years ago, we 
should not have committed the blunder of 
Moses in getting the effect before the cause ! 
If you and I had written an account of the 
creation less than a century ago, we should 
not have fallen on the mistake of Moses, 
for even then we should have created 
light and the sun simultaneously! But we 
should have been wrong, for Moses was 
right. It was either a remarkable piece of 
good fortune that Moses stumbled upon the 
fact, — a wild guess, — or he was divinely 
inspired to make a statement wholly at 
variance with his contemporary knowledge 
and with subsequent science down almost 
to the present generation. He saw without 
a telescope or spectroscope what the nine- 
teenth century has discovered with one. 
The nebular hypothesis demands the ap- 
pearance of light before the sun himself; 
and what took place in our system during 
the ages of which Moses wrote is now 

53 



Did Man Make God, or 



taking place in other parts of the universe 
under our very eyes. We do not need to 
go back to the time of which Moses wrote, 
for there are universes now in process of 
evolution before our eyes, in which light 
has dawned, but whose blazing suns will 
not appear for eons to come. 

Go out with me on a winter night and 
look at the magnificent constellation of 
Orion. With the naked eye we see some- 
thing besides the stars of that beautiful 
group. We see a hazy patch of nebulous 
light. Is that cloud of light composed of 
stars so far away that they seem to touch? 
That is what the astronomers used to teach. 
Turn on the telescope. Still it appears as 
a cloud of light, and not as a group of stars. 
Perhaps they may yet be stars so remote 
that the telescope cannot resolve them. 
Even that is what the astronomers taught 
when the telescope failed to separate them. 
Catch the light in the spectroscope, for that 
will unveil the mystery. Lo, it is not an 
assemblage of suns, but a nebulous mass of 
cloudy matter in the process of becoming a 

54 



Did God Make Man? 



sun. It is the first day in that evolving 
system. God has already said in that 
remote region, ''Let there be light/' for 
we see it even here; but there is yet no 
sun. It is now only the closing period of 
the first stage, or day, in the development 
of that new universe, at the beginning of 
which the system ''was without form, and 
void, and darkness was upon the face of 
the deep.*' 

Science can trace some of the remaining 
steps that are yet to be taken yonder in 
the eons to come. The central mass now 
visible to us will yet become a fiery globe 
like our sun, but that will be long after 
other things have come to pass in that dis- 
tant universe. That revolving mass of 
nebulous matter has either already thrown 
off rings, or will yet throw off rings, that 
will condense into worlds like ours. And 
God will say in the second stage, "Let there 
be a firmament in the midst of the waters," 
and the atmosphere of these new worlds 
will be cleared of its mists, and the waters 
will settle to their places in the great deeps. 

55 



Did Man Make God, or 



And in the third stage he will say, 
although science cannot see how, ''Let the 
worlds bring forth life,'* and vegetation 
will appear, born of the glowing heat and 
light of the condensing central mass of 
nebulous matter from which the young 
worlds had already sprung. 

And in the fourth stage he will say, for 
science can see this vision, ''Let there 
be lights in the firmament, the sun for the 
day and the moons for the night;" for by 
the time that fourth stage shall have come 
in the sweep of the far-off future the nebu- 
lous mass will have condensed into a burning 
sun, long after the edict of Almighty God 
had gone forth: "Let there be light." 

This is as far as science can clearly see, 
but with the eye of Moses it may penetrate 
still farther into the remoter future and see 
the fifth stage, in which God shall say, "Let 
the seas bring forth life;" and living crea- 
tures will appear. 

And with the Mosaic vision science may 
catch glimpses even of the sixth stage, in 
the beginning of which God shall say, "Let 

.56 



Did God Make Man? 



the worlds bring forth beast and cattle and 
creeping things;:" and the obedient orbs 
will teem with life, sprung at the divine 
command from lower forms. Yea, with 
Mosaic eye, science may peer even to the 
ending of the sixth stage, when God shall 
say, as only God can say: ''Let us make 
beings in our image and after our likeness ;" 
and lo, a godlike race of immortals will 
appear. 

When Moses wrote the history of the 
successive stages of creation he wrote noth- 
ing that conflicts with the science of the 
closing years of the nineteenth century, 
provided we compare what we understand 
of his history with what science knows to 
be true. Moses is not incorrect up to 
date. There are some obscure things in his 
account that seem to conflict with some 
obscure things in science; but when the 
obscurity in both cases shall disappear in 
the light of future discoveries, we may 
expect to see the apparent conflicts dis- 
appear, as others have done in the light of 
past discovery. 

57 



Did Man Make God, or 



The other alleged instances of conflict, 
presented by Mr. Ingersoll, between the 
Bible and the known facts of science, are 
trivial and unworthy, such as the charge 
that the Bible teaches that the world is flat, 
that the earth is the center and the sun re- 
volves about it, and the like. The Bible 
simply uses the common language of appear- 
ances, precisely as does Mr. Ingersoll him- 
self, and the science which he glorifies. 
He speaks of the rising and the setting of 
the sun, and so does every scientific writer 
of this age; do they still believe the world 
flat, and the center of the universe? What- 
ever may have been the ignorance of the 
sacred writers themselves concerning the 
course of nature, their inspired accounts 
are, for the most part, easily squared with 
present knowledge, and • that without 
violent interpretation. 

2. Mr. Ingersoll charges that the Bible 
is unscientific, because it is unnaturaL 
That is, it rests its claims on the *'fraud'' 
of miracles. '*A miracle,'' he says, "is the 
badge and brand of fraud. No miracle ever 

58 



Did God Make Man? 



was performed. '' A miracle is unnatural, 
he claims, and, therefore, unscientific. 

Now, I am not going over the arguments 
for and against miracles. Mr. Hume put 
the case against them as strongly as it can 
be done, and his argument has been torn 
to pieces a thousand times since his day. 
Not a shred of it remains. I have some- 
thing better to do than to dig up the bones 
of a dead issue. I am here on a living 
issue, and with the latest word of science; 
and I undertake to say that if a miracle is 
unscientific, then science itself is unscien- 
tific; for of all the miracles in the history 
of the visible universe, those demanded by 
science are the most stupendous. The 
standing still of the sun on Gibeon, the 
lifting up of the waves of the Red Sea, the 
gushing forth of water from dry rocks, the 
healing of lepers — yea, even the raising of 
the dead, — all of these are insignificant in 
comparison with the standing miracle of the 
visible universe itself with which science is 
concerned. 

Whence came the universe that confronts 
59 



Did Man Make God, or 



us, and of which we are a part? Science is 
unable to account for it except by an infin- 
ite miracle. I am not speaking of theology 
now, but of science. And I am speaking 
of that branch of science whose most ex- 
travagant dictum we are accustomed to 
accept as an incontrovertible truth, — I 
mean the science of mathematics. Mathe- 
matics cannot account for the visible uni- 
verse unless by a stupendous miracle. Let 
us see. I shall use familiar words, rather 
than the technical terms of science. 

Mathematics is unable to account for the 
present high temperature of the sun with- 
out a miracle. That is, the sun is hotter 
than he ought to be if his heat has come 
from known sources alone. All the heat of 
the sun, with insignificant exception, is the 
direct result of the contraction of his gas- 
eous mass. But the sun is vastly hotter 
than this contraction can explain. Mathe- 
matics indicates that he has already parted 
with more heat than he ever could have 
possessed as the result of known forces. 

It is a fact beyond question that the visi- 
60 



Did God Make Man? 



ble universe is parting with its heat. The 
planets are radiating it in every direction, 
and only an infinitesimal fraction of it is 
being returned by reflection or re-radiation 
from the orbs of space. The sun himself is 
radiating heat at an enormous rate, only an 
inappreciable part of which is returned to 
his diminished store. What is true of the 
sun and planets in this respect is true of all 
suns and systems of worlds. The visible 
universe is, therefore, losing its heat. If 
it is now losing heat, then by the law of 
continuity, the same was true a thousand 
years ago, — a thousand ages ago — indeed, 
if the visible universe has existed from 
eternity, the loss must have been going on 
forever. 

Now, it is well known that a gaseous body 
in a free space grows hotter by cooling. 
This is how it occurs: Assume such a body 
acted on by no forces except its own grav- 
ity and the heat of its molecules. It radi- 
ates heat into the surrounding space and at 
once becomes cooler. Immediately upon 
this loss of heat, the gravity of the mass, 

6i 



Did Man Make God, or 



having less repulsive force to oppose, draws 
the particles nearer to the center. That is, 
the gas contracts, and it does so by a fall 
of its particles toward the center. The 
body thereby becomes denser, and the 
average heat of its particles is accordingly 
increased. The visible motion of the atoms 
in falling is transformed into heat when the 
fall ceases; and mathematics easily shows 
that the gain of temperature in the con- 
traction is greater than the loss of tempera- 
ture which occasioned the contraction. A 
gaseous body, then, upon cooling contracts, 
and upon contracting grows warmer than it 
was before the contraction occurred; and 
thus the temperature will steadily rise until 
near the time when the mass begins to 
liquefy. After liquefaction, the body will 
lose heat more rapidly than the contraction 
can restore it. 

If the sun be a perfect gas, he will con- 
tinue to contract and grow hotter thereby 
until he approaches a liquid state. Then 
radiation of heat will take place more rap- 
idly than contraction can restore it, and the 

62 



Did God Make Man? 



great luminary will begin to grow cooler. 
Until that time comes, — if it has not already 
come, — the sun must grow hotter. If he 
has already reached or passed that stage, 
then at some time past, while yet a gas, he 
reached his maximum temperature. 

Beginning at that time and going back- 
ward, we find the sun in this reverse pro- 
cess expanding and growing cooler the 
farther back we go. Let us carry this pro- 
cess backward to the time when the sun 
filled all the space out to Mercury, Venus, 
Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, 
Neptune, — and perhaps crowding closely 
upon the territory of the nearest star. He 
was then very large, but relatively cold. 

Now the heat of the sun at the present 
time should at least be equal to the amount 
generated by the fall of these particles 
through this immense space to their pres- 
ent position in the sun, less the amount of 
heat radiated into space during the entire 
time of the fall, or contraction. 

The larger the original dimensions of the 
sun, the greater will have been the amount 

63 



Did Man Make God, or 



of heat generated by the fall ; but it can be 
readily shown that if the sun originally 
filled infinite space — which he could not 
have done — and had been contracting and 
rising in temperature from all eternity, the 
total amount of heat generated during the 
infinite period of contraction would be 
finite. Moreover, it is calculated within a 
reasonable degree of approximation that 
the total amount of heat generated during 
an eternal contraction of the sun down to 
his present dimensions would have been 
eighteen million times the amount of heat 
which he now radiates in one year. It is 
also believed by astronomers that the annual 
radiation of heat during the past eighteen 
million years of the sun's existence could 
not, on an average, have been less than the 
annual radiation at the present time. Pro- 
fessor Newcomb thinks that the radiation 
was greater. 

We are thus driven to the astounding 
conclusion that the sun must have been 
contracting forever in order to have sup- 
plied the radiation of heat that has been 

64 



Did God Make Man? 



expended during only the last eighteen 
million years. 

That is, the actual expenditure of heat 
during the last eighteen million years would 
have exhausted the total supply of heat 
produced by an eternal condensation, leav- 
ing none of that heat for radiation before 
or after this epoch of eighteen million 
years. But the sun was, without doubt, 
radiating heat at a rapid rate before this 
epoch began, and will continue the radia- 
tion for ages yet to come. 

That is, the sun must have existed from 
eternity in order to have existed only dur- 
ing the past eighteen million years! 

That is, the sun must have existed for- 
ever before he began to exist at all ! 

In order, therefore, to relieve this absur- 
dity, mathematics cannot find any ground 
except that a miracle by which this excess 
of heat was supplied must at some time in 
the finite past have been wrought upon the 
sun, provided he has existed forever; or 
that the miracle of creation must have 



65 



Did Man Make God, or 



brought forth the sun at a period in the 
finite past. 

What is thus true of our sun, would seem 
to be true of all suns. That is, either the 
visible universe existed eternally before it 
began to exist at all, or a miracle of crea- 
tion was wrought in the finite past. The 
visible universe is either an infinite miracle 
or an infinite absurdity. When it comes to 
a choice between a miracle and an absur- 
dity, I will take the miracle and leave the 
absurdity for the agnostic. 

I will not consume your time by showing, 
as science most conclusively shows and 
demands, that whatever may have been the 
manner of man's origin or of the origin of 
the various species, the original advent of 
life into the universe must also have been 
a miracle. 

Here, then, are the two greatest miracles 
in the history of the visible universe: the 
original appearance of the universe itself, 
and the original advent of life, miracles 
which science itself cannot gainsay. A 
miracle, therefore, is not necessarily unsci- 

66 



Did God Make Man? 



entific, and the Bible may rest on miracles 
without clashing with science. 

3. Mr. Ingersoll charges that the scheme 
of revelation is unscientific, because it is 
superstitious: that is, it rests on faith. When 
it cannot see any farther, it simply shuts 
its eyes and trusts. Now, if shutting one's 
eyes and trusting when one has reached the 
limits of his vision be superstition, then Mr. 
Ingersoll is as superstitious as St. Paul, and 
science is as superstitious as the Christian 
scheme. 

If faith be unscientific, science is unsci- 
entific; and the agnostic who exalts science 
and ridicules faith is equally unscientific. 
Mr. Ingersoll himself has not taken a step 
in the last fifty years that was not based on 
faith. He has not performed an act that 
was not founded in faith. He has not with- 
drawn himself into a state of passivity so 
extreme as to get beyond the domain of 
faith. He has not ascended the heights of 
reason so far as to get out of the atmos- 
phere of faith. His memory cannot carry 
him back beyond the beginning of faith. 

67 



Did Man Make God, or 



His imagination cannot outrun or outfly 
faith. His intuition cannot penetrate so 
deeply into the invisible essence of things 
as not to find faith already there waiting 
for its coming. Yea, every moment of his 
life, sleeping or waking, he exercises the 
same faith that the Christian scheme 
demands of the children of God, — the very 
faith which he stigmatizes as childish, su- 
perstitious and fetish, — the faith not merely 
of belief, but of trust. 

His sleep is the sleep of trust. What 
warrant has he that his heart will keep on 
beating, his lungs will keep on breathing, 
and his blood will keep on flowing during 
the unconscious hours of the night? The 
warrant of faith alone. 

He eats the bread of faith. Whence came 
it? It grew in the fields where the air of 
heaven blew upon it. That was God's work 
and he could well afford to trust it. But 
men gathered it in sheaves. What room 
for treachery! Men whisked it through 
the threshing machine; might naught but 
the dust of the thresher have settled among 

68 



Did God Make Man? 



the shining grains? Men ground it between 
great stones; can his eye distinguish flour 
from strychnia? Men bartered it for gold, 
but gold will buy poison as well as flour. 
Is he sure that there was no treason against 
human trust in the long train of men 
between the farmer who sowed his grain 
and the baker who prepared the loaf for his 
table? He eats by faith in a thousand men 
he never saw. 

Whence comes the water with which he 
slakes his thirst? From the clouds, through 
air tainted with poison; over rocks on 
which the venomous reptile has sunned 
himself; through poisonous germs and fetid 
remains in the soil; through vaults and 
caverns where disease breeds and death 
reigns. Does he carry his microscope with 
him? Does he stop long enough to read 
the tell-tale lines of death in the spectro- 
scope? No; he slakes his thirst by faith. 

He opens wide his lungs to receive the 
air; but whence comes it? From every- 
where ; from other lungs, both human and 
animal ; from hospital and dungeon ; from 

69 



Did Man Make God, or 



the upper rim of the atmosphere and from 
the dank caverns of the earth ; from kissing 
the dew drop and from fanning the fevered 
brow ; from the spray of the waterfall and 
through the poisonous breath of the pesti- 
lence. It has come from where death is, 
and it may bear death on its wings; but he 
opens his lungs and bids it welcome. Does 
he stop to analyze it? Just how long would 
he live if he stopped to scrutinize every 
atom of every current that flows into his 
lungs? He breathes by trust. Either let 
Mr. Ingersoll withdraw the charge of su- 
perstition against the Christian scheme, 
or let his anathemas fall upon his own 
head. 

And science itself — it cannot take a step 
without faith. Science raises the level of 
human knowledge by induction, and by in- 
duction alone; and the very essence of 
induction is faith — faith in the uniformity 
of nature and the continuity of its processes. 
Science writes the history of the universe 
by faith. Science pursues its present proc- 
esses by faith. Science predicts the future 

'zo 



Did God Make Man? 



by faith. For all of the great laws of nature 
discovered by science were reached by 
induction, and they still stand by faith. 
. Moreover, some of the postulates of sci- 
ence produce a greater strain on faith than 
do any of the postulates of the Christian 
scheme. 

No scientific scholar doubts the reality 
of Newton's great law of gravitation, and 
yet that law demands a contradiction; 
namely, that matter can act where it is not. 
Every atom in the universe, by Newton's 
law, acts instantaneously on every other 
atom, whether near or remote. It is a 
hopeless contradiction that an atom can act 
where it is not; science itself recognizes the 
absurdity ; but in spite of the contradiction, 
the world of science accepts the law because 
it explains the facts. 

The molecular theory of physics demands 
a quality in the atoms which contradicts 
our experience, namely, perfect elasticity, 
a property which we know does not exist 
in matter as it is presented to our senses. 
Science perceives the anomaly but accepts 

71 



Did Man Make God, or 



the law, because it is a satisfactory working 
hypothesis. 

But perhaps the wildest postulate of 
modern science is the existence of the 
ethereal medium, or ether of space, through 
which heat, light and other forms of energy 
are transmitted. This ether is assumed to 
be an adamantine solid, more rigid than 
steel, and yet more pliable than air. Did 
you ever see such a solid? Suppose Moses 
had described such a solid! It is infinitely 
elastic and yet infinitely rare or diffuse, — 
two qualities which are hopelessly contra- 
dictory. We live in it, and move through 
it; but it offers no apparent resistance. 
This contradiction of thought, this stupen- 
dous absurdity, fills all space, even between 
the atoms. The worlds fly through it in 
their orbits, but are not appreciably im- 
peded. It is infinitely tenacious, and yet 
it pours around us like the rarest gas. This 
apparent and utter impossibility and irrec- 
oncilable contradiction of modern science 
is accepted, believed in, defended and 
sworn by, because it explains the facts of 

72 



Did God Make Man? 



heat and light. No postulate of science is 
too absurd or too impossible, provided it 
serve as a good working hypothesis. 

Yet Mr. Ingersoll stumbles at a few 
mysteries in the Christian scheme, — mys- 
teries that presume less on credulity than 
do the mysteries of science, — mysteries that 
strain faith less than do the mysteries of 
science, — contradictions which vanish as in- 
significant when set alongside the contradic- 
tions of science. It is all right for science 
to bow down and worship a contradiction, if 
it happen to furnish a good working hypo- 
thesis; but it is superstitious for religion to 
insist on an apparent contradiction, even 
though it furnish the only working hypothe- 
sis by which the human race can be re- 
deemed. In the name of science I declare 
that the alleged contradictions in the law of 
gravitation, the molecular law of physics and 
the ether of space are only seeming contra- 
dictions; for they are working hypotheses 
which reveal the truth of nature, and they 
must in some unseen way be in harmony 
with nature. And in the name of the 



73 



Did Man Make God, or 



Christian religion I declare that the alleged 
inconsistencies of the Bible are only seem- 
ing conflicts, for the Christian scheme is a 
working hypothesis which reveals the truth 
of God in the upward trend of the nations 
that have come under its sway. The Chris- 
tian scheme, however mysterious in some 
of its parts, fits in with the scheme of human 
nature, and cannot, therefore, be self-con- 
tradictory. 

A working hypothesis in science is one 
which must be able to prophesy, and the 
working hypothesis of Christianity is the 
prophecy of the ultimate redemption and 
elevation of the human race and of an im- 
mortal destiny for the individual soul. 

If science is not unscientific because it 
rests on faith, the Christian religion may 
safely rest upon the same foundation. 

4. All the remaining so-called scientific 
objections against the Christian scheme can 
be summed up under the charge that // is 
not adapted to the work which it sets out to do. 

The essence of the Gospel is self-sacrifice, 
and Mr. IngersoU condemns the philosophy 

74 



Did God Make Man? 



of self-sacrifice as taught by Jesus. He 
says that it is impracticable, absurd and 
impossible. 

That it is neither impracticable, absurd 
nor impossible plainly appears when we 
look at the author and exemplifier of the 
philosophy of self-sacrifice. A thing which 
has been done is neither absurd nor impos- 
sible. The absurdity lies in the charge of 
absurdity. Jesus Christ asks men to do 
what he did, — no more, — namely, to sacri- 
fice themselves for others. He asks men 
to weep tears which else had been wept by 
others; to endure pain which else had been 
endured by others; to forego pleasures 
which else had been foregone by others, 
and, if necessary, to pass through deaths 
which else must have been suffered by 
others. And if the world of mankind 
should at the opening of the twentieth 
century universally begin to practice the 
philosophy of self-sacrifice as Jesus prac- 
ticed it and as he commands men to do, 
how long, think you, before strikes would 
cease; before the social questions would 

75 



Did Man Make God, or 



solve themselves; before war, slavery and 
oppression would disappear, and before the 
millennium of universal justice, liberty, 
brotherhood and love would dawn upon the 
race? 

Mr. Ingersoll objects to Jesus because 
his philosophy is passive and non-resisting, 
and therefore, because it is not adapted to 
the environment in which it must work. 
Do not be confused. The philosophy of 
Jesus is passive and non-resisting only as 
between man and man, when their selfish 
interests seem to clash. In such a case, 
each is to give way to the other. But it is 
not passive and non-resisting when truth 
faces error, when right faces wrong, when 
human liberty faces slavery and when the 
good of the race is threatened by the sword 
of evil. Then comes the day of battle, in 
which the man who would die for the sake 
of his fellow must thrust forth his sword 
for the sake of truth. The man who sacri- 
fices himself for others is no more an ex- 
ponent of the gospel of self-sacrifice than 
the man who will fight to the end lest truth, 

76 



Did God Make Man? 



right and liberty be sent to their graves. 
There must be war in the universe until 
wrong goes down to its fathomless grave. 
Here is the philosophy of the Gospel, — self- 
crucifixion as between man and man, but 
self-assertion as between the eternal right 
and the eternal wrong. 

The proof of a working hypothesis is in the 
way it works. There is no demonstration 
like success. Wherever the Christian phi- 
losophy has had its way, both nations and 
individuals have been exalted to a plane of 
unexampled prosperity ; and all this in spite 
of the unnamable horrors and corruptions 
that have been practiced along the highway 
of history in the name of the Gospel, by 
men who wore the cloak of Christianity, 
but who never knew its spirit. 

I know that Mr. Ingersoll intimates that 
silk hats and suspenders have had as much 
to do with western civilization as Bibles and 
churches; but the world will be slow to 
accept his view until he shows how the silk 
hat and suspender philosophy has in it the 
promise and potency of a grand civilization. 

77 



Did Man Make God, or 



So far as the philosophy of the hat and the 
suspender contains within itself the ele- 
ments that tend to civilize, so far I will give 
credit to the hat and suspender civilization. 
And while the Gospel contains the essence 
of all that is good in the new civilization as 
it now exists, and the essence of a newer 
and better civilization yet to come, the 
world will not be deceived by the cry of 
silk hats and suspenders. 

After all, the test of a philosophy is in its 
outcome. Suppose a consignment of silk 
hats and suspenders had been sent out 
nineteen centuries ago from Jerusalem to 
the western world. Is it likely the present 
civilization would have been the outcome? 
But something was sent out which took hold 
of the consciences and intellects of men, 
and wherever it went a new civilization 
appeared, and men began to grasp the sub- 
lime truth of universal brotherhood. It 
took hold upon the hearts as well as the 
brains of the people and found therein a 
response to its innermost essence. I know 
that Mohammedanism spread rapidly, but 

78, 



Did God Make Man? 



it spread before the sword and not before 
the unarmed truth. But there were no 
swords for the establishment and propaga- 
tion of the Gospel. It needed none. It 
opened its own way into the wills of men. 
The more intelligent men become, the more 
rapidly they come under the sway of its 
philosophy. During the nineteenth cen- 
tury, when modern civilization has reached 
its climax, the philosophy of the Gospel has 
commended itself more cogently to western 
intelligence than ever before; and during 
the years of this century it has made greater 
headway than during all the eighteen hun- 
dred years gone by. During this century, 
in which by the prophecy of Voltaire 
Christianity was to be sleeping in its grave, 
it has more than doubled the number of its 
followers. Just how long it will require 
for Christianity to die if it continue, as 
now, to double its forces every century, I 
leave to the mathematics of agnosticism. 

Christianity keeps pace with the progress 
of history simply because, contrary to Mr. 
IngersoU, it is adapted to its environment, 

79 



Did Man Make God, or 



— and that environment is the intellect, 
heart, volition and conscience of humanity. 
The author of the Gospel and the author of 
the human soul must be one and the same, 
for the soul and the Gospel fit each other 
completely ; and humanity can never cease 
to be the half hinge of which the Gospel is 
the other half, until the constitution of the 
human soul is reversed. 

I have now examined the principal stric- 
tures of Mr. Ingersoll against the God of the 
Bible. I have ignored much — his blunders, 
both historical and scientific, his unfair and 
overdrawn statements, his half truths 
which he has stated with such beauty and 
eloquence as to have the appearance of 
whole truths, and his many foolish, frivolous 
and flippant charges, which cannot stand 
alone. I have overlooked his men of straw 
that he has taken delight in setting up that 
he might thereupon knock them down 
again. Vanquishing straw figures has con- 
stituted no little part of his work. He has 
killed more dead men in the last quarter of 
a century than any other prominent orator 

80 



Did God Make Man? 



of the land. He has gone out to the theo- 
logical grave yards and laboriously dug up 
the carcasses of dead and decaying theories, 
and has heroically brought them forth and 
— killed them. It is not difficult to kill a 
dead thing. 

I have overlooked his wit in which he has 
time and again begged the question while 
he carried his audience by storm. How 
easy it is to beg the question in a flash of wit 
and then to disguise the fallacy by dazzling 
the eye with the lightning of the wit! 

Here is an instance. He says that, if he 
had been God, he would have made health 
catching instead of disease. His auditors 
applaud the brilliancy of that sentiment, 
and fail to discover that he begs the whole 
question in the flash of wit. Just as if 
health were not catching! What have you 
been doing through all these years? The 
majority of you during the greater part of 
your lives have scarcely known a pain. You 
easily remember the isolated instances of 
discomfort and suffering, but what of those 
other uncounted moments of ease and 

8i 



Did Man Make God, or 



enjoyment? You have been catching health 
by night and by day. You have been 
catching health from the sweet sleep your 
Heavenly Father has given you, from the 
pure air you have breathed, from the cheer- 
fulness and contentment of your fellows, 
and from God's beneficent laws every- 
where. Mr. IngersoU forgot to say in the 
same connection that, if he had been God, 
he would have made grass green instead of 
cucumbers. 

All these things I have overlooked, but I 
have frankly endeavored to consider in a 
calm, comprehensive and fundamental way, 
the real essence of his criticisms. If I am 
wrong and he is right, then man made God. 
If I am right and he is wrong, then God 

made man. 

* * * * 

Nothing now remains for me to do but to 
show you the outlook under either case. 

If man made God, what is the future? 
What does agnosticism propose for human- 
ity? It offers nothing but the visible, and 
the visible does not extend beyond the 

82 



Did God Make Man? 



present. If there be no God but the one 
made by men, there is no future either for 
the race or for the individual. 

Take away from all men the ever present 
conviction of a supreme Ruler and Judge, 
and the human race will lapse into barbar- 
ism more rapidly than, under this convic- 
tion, it has forged its way up the heights 
of civilization. Mr. Ingersoll may believe, 
if he will, that reverence for the unseen 
Jehovah, and the spirit of submission to 
his will are exploded superstitions, and that 
they are obstacles in the progress of civil- 
ization, discouraging art, science, education 
and liberty; but once let the human race 
lose its reverence for God and deny his 
authority to rule, and that instant the 
wheels of civilization will begin to roll 
backward, and art, science, education and 
liberty will vanish more rapidly than they 
ever grew. If man owes no allegiance to a 
higher throne than humanity; if there are 
no checks upon mankind other than those 
it sees fit to put upon itself; if humanity 
has to answer to no more authoritative 

83 



Did Man Make God, or 



behests than those of its own issuing, then 
the future of the race is written ; its destiny- 
is deterioration, decay, barbarism, savagery 
and despair. The hope of the race is its 
anchorage to the invisible. 

And if man made God, what is to be the 
destiny of the individual? If the whole 
fabric of immortality, guaranteed by the 
immutable character and word of Jehovah, 
vanish into nothingness with the unmaking 
of a man-made God, what is the promise 
for the soul in the worlds to come? What 
shall make equal the inequalities of this 
life? What shall render justice to the 
myriads who lived and died under the smart 
of injustice? What shall give liberty to 
the clanking chains of slavery under which 
the oppressed of all ages went down to their 
fate? What shall proclaim emancipation to 
the high spirited and noble minded who 
chafed under the rod of tyranny? What 
shall compensate for the relentless poverty, 
the gnawing hunger, the burning thirst, the 
biting cold, and the raging fevers, under 
the horrors of which untold myriads 

84 



Did God Make Man? 



marched from the cradle to the grave? 
What shall undo the treachery of false 
friendship, the disappointments of noble 
ambition and the failure of hard wrought 
plans, at the sight of which so many human 
hearts have broken? What shall restore 
the wrecks of hope? What shall give back 
health to the blight of faith? What shall 
be the resurrection for the grave of love? 
Look down into the grave, and what can 
the agnostic show you? What comfort can 
he give you? What hope can he kindle? 
What pictures of immortality can he paint? 
What promise can he make to your trem- 
bling heart? Behind you is the brief span of 
life. You loved awhile, but you could not 
keep the objects of your love. They slipped 
from your grasp into the grave. Your 
heart, your life went with them. Ask the 
agnostic for one word of cheer. He gives 
you none. The grave is the end. Love is 
only a reminiscence, and is not to come 
forth to greet you beyond the charnel house. 
The coffin is the goal. They nailed under 
its lid the faith, hope, love, intellect, con- 

85 



Did Man Make God, or 



science, power and possibility of those you 
loved. The somber hearse and the mourn- 
ful funeral train announced the termina- 
tion of careers, — careers begun in time and 
ended once for all in time. The sexton 
smothered the fires of immortality under 
the clods. There is no more music in the 
universe, for those who went or for you 
who stay. The birds will sing no more. 
The flowers will never bloom again. The 
sun will cease to shine. The stars have 
gone out forever. Truth is dead, and the 
horrible pall of despair spreads over the 
soul. Again I say, what shall be the 
resurrection for the grave of love? 

Let the mother, as she catches the first 
glimpse of the hectic flush on the cheek of 
her darling, send for the agnostic and beg 
for a word of consolation. *'Fever?'* he 
replies, ''Why, it is only the rush of atoms; 
and those smiles of beauty you once looked 
upon with ecstasy were only the march of 
atoms; those childish peals of laughter 
were only the play of molecules; that in- 
stinctive clinging to you for protection in 

86 



Did God Make Man? 



the moments of its terror was only a molec- 
ular disturbance; those shafts of love shot 
forth from its beaming eyes, were only the 
vibrations of the invisible ether. Have 
courage, dear mother. The atoms will soon 
take other form, and the child of your 
heart will after awhile reappear to you in 
the snow-flake, the dew-drop, the rose-bud, 
the lily, the sting of the adder, the tooth of 
the lion and the claw of the tiger." And 
is that to be the outcome of the hectic 
flush on the cheek of the mother's dar- 
ling? 

Let the mother, gazing through the coffin 
lid with eyes that cannot weep, ask the 
agnostic for comfort. * 'Death,'' he replies, 
"it is the end; the end of smiles as well as 
tears; the end of hope as well as despair; 
the end of joys as well as sorrows; the end 
of love as well as hate ; the end — the end — 
THE end! Command your molecules, dear 
mother, to fall in line and to go on obedi- 
ently with their monotonous rounds, until 
the next coffin comes into your home, and 
the next, and the next, and then after 

87 



Did Man Make God, or 



your heart has broken with despair, you 
may go to be a fellow atom with your 
child in the busy laboratory of the world/' 

And once again, I say, what shall roll 
away the stone from the door of love's 
sepulchre? Call upon the agnostic for the 
answer. What does he say? What can he 
say? What must he say? The only answer 
he can give is the wild wail of despair. 

What mean the irrepressible yearnings of 
the soul for a destiny? What means the 
instinct of God and immortality that cannot 
be scourged from the soul by centuries of 
the lash, that cannot be educated from the 
soul by ages of culture, that cannot be daz- 
zled or outshone in the soul by the inkind- 
ling of the blaze of intelligence ; an instinct 
that knows neither age nor climate, neither 
circumstance nor condition ; an ever present 
prophet in the soul that speaks of destiny? 
Is the prophet true, or false? The soul 
feels within itself the stirrings of immor- 
tality and in the present it reads the promise 
of a glorious future. But if man made 
God, that future will never come. The 

88 



Did God Make Man? 



inequalities of life will never be made equal. 
The stupendous failure of human life will 
never be undone. The soul sees within 
itself the prophecy of better things to be, 
but they will never come. The soul sees 
within an endless destiny as the arena for 
its new-born powers, but the destiny will 
never come. The soul ceases in the very 
act of becoming. Reason, judgment, 
memory and imagination shall perish, the 
will shall relax its grasp, conscience shall 
become extinct, faith shall fade, hope shall 
wither and love shall die. 

If man made God, then after the irre- 
parable failure of life, human destiny is to 
rot in the grave. 

But if God made man, what is destiny? 
What shall be the destiny of the race? The 
destiny of the race will be toward a per- 
fect civilization, in which self-assertion for 
the truth and self-crucifixion for others will 
be the ideal. 

But what shall I say of the destiny of the 
individual? If man was made by God, his 
destiny will be in keeping with his origin. 

89 



Did Man Make God, or 



Tell me the origin of man, and I will show 
you his destiny. 

We cannot tell whither we are going, 
until we know whence we have come. We 
cannot rise above our source. If we came 
from matter, to matter we shall return. If 
the clods were our origin, the clods will be 
our destiny. But if we had our origin in 
the eternal purpose of God, we shall have 
our endless destiny in him. If God began 
thinking about us innumerable ages before 
we were ushered into being, he will not 
cease thinking about us, now that we have 
come. 

Go back to the beginning, before sun or 
moon or star had appeared, when all space 
was filled with nebulous matter infinitely 
diffused through measureless lengths and 
breadths and depths. Suppose God said, 
"I will make a race of beings like unto my- 
self. I will not be in haste, but will take 
the infinite future for the task." So he hid 
himself in every atom as a ceaseless force, 
and began, in its initial stages, the unend- 
ing work of development. Matter began to 

90 



Did God Make Man? 



move upon itself. By infinitely slow proc- 
esses the work of condensation went on. 
But all the time God saw in the far-off 
future the beginnings of a race of beings 
that were eventually to approximate his 
own perfection. Age after age went by; 
cycle after cycle rolled on. The pendulum 
of the clock of eternity moved slowly over 
its infinite arc, and after an infinite number 
of vibrations, each vibration requiring 
infinite ages for its majestic sweep, the 
stars began to form out of chaos. The sun, 
a seething mass of nebulous matter, his 
circumference reaching out to the nearest 
star, took his place where God had decreed 
in his ancient plan. All this time God was 
getting a place ready for the coming of 
something higher than star-dust and more 
glorious than the stars. His eternal plan 
was gradually unfolding. By slow degrees 
the huge solar mass gathered toward the 
center, leaving planet after planet behind. 
And then the earth appeared, fiery like the 
sun from which it sprang. But every 
motion of every atom through all these 

91 



Did Man Make God, or 



innumerable ages was only a part of the 
stupendous plan by which a godlike race of 
beings was to appear. And then came life 
by the divine energy, life in its lowest 
form ; and after untold ages of waiting, a 
higher form appeared, and still a higher, 
until at last, by the fiat of omnipotence, 
man took his place on the earth ; man, of 
whom God had been thinking from eternity, 
and for whose advent he had prepared the 
earth by processes of marvelous complexity 
through cycles of inconceivable duration. 
If God has thus taken infinite pains to 
bring us here, he is not going to withdraw 
his hand from us at this late day. At this 
late day? Nay, rather, at this early day; 
for there is more before us than there is 
behind us. I have said that we cannot tell 
whither we are going, until we know whence 
we have come. We have come through the 
eternal purpose of God, working through 
endless cycles of the past on a scale of 
inconceivable magnitude; and God alone 
can tell the measureless heights to which 
he will yet bring us in the endless unfolding 

92 



Did God Make Man? 



of his plan. If we become dizzy, looking 
back into the fathomless depths out of 
which we have sprung, we are overwhelmed 
at the still greater heights that tower above 
us. 

Shall we venture to ascend the slope a 
little way? We have tried to measure the 
distance between the dead atom back 
yonder in the beginning and the living soul 
now here, and on its way to destiny; but 
we have found the distance immeasurable. 
Go forward into the future as far as we 
have come out of the past, remembering 
that the rate of progress in the upward 
sweep of the soul is geometrical and not 
arithmetical. The onward march of the 
soul is not at a constant pace, but at an ever 
increasing rate. A body falling to the 
earth passes through sixteen feet the first 
second, three times that distance the next, 
five times as much the third, and so on 
through each succeeding second of its fall. 
That is what I mean by an increasing 
rate. The distance through which the body 
falls would constantly increase, even if the 

93 



Did Man Make God, or 



rate of fall remained the same; how much 
more will the distance of its fall increase 
when you give it an accelerating rate! If 
away back in the depths of eternity a body 
had started from the outer limits of space 
to fall toward the sun, its rate of approach 
at first would have been inconceivably slow ; 
but as the ages rolled on, its velocity would 
have increased with each succeeding in- 
stant, until at last it would have darted into 
the fiery billows of the sun at a rate of 
appalling speed. The longer a body 
approaches a center of attraction, the 
more rapid becomes its approach. With a 
uniform velocity, it will, if you give it time 
enough, pass over an inconceivable distance ; 
how much more so, if its velocity increase 
as the distances are traversed ! 

Away back in the eternities when God 
determined to take the first beginnings in 
the development of the universe toward 
beings capable of destiny, how slow and 
tedious was the progress! But on through 
the cycles the rate of advance increased, 
until now we find the human soul with an 

94 



Did God Make Man? 



infinite distance behind it reaching back to 
the eternal purpose of God from which it 
sprang, and with expanding powers and 
accelerating pace approaching the unattain- 
able perfections of God to which it shall 
forever press. God is the center toward 
which we may tend, and the soul drawn by 
him shall sweep on with an increasing rate 
through the eternity yet to come. 

The powers of the soul, already godlike in 
their nature, will expand until they become 
godlike in their compass. Memory will 
not be limited to the events of a day, but 
will seize all of its past in one comprehen- 
sive grasp. Perception will not be limited 
to the narrow circle of contact, but will 
spread out over an ever widening horizon. 
Judgment will not be confined to the com- 
parison of two mental states at a time, but 
will gather into its view a constantly in- 
creasing throng of conceptions. Imagina- 
tion will not be held to a region determined 
by five physical senses, but unseen heights 
will rise before its expanding wings. Rea- 
son will not need to climb by slow and 

95 



Did Man Make God, or 



painful ascent the steepening summits of 
truth, but with godlike majesty it will 
swoop upon the greatest thoughts. The 
will, center of the soul, will reign with 
equal poise, its inflexible purpose reaching 
out into the eternity to come. The con- 
science, eye of the soul, that gazes unhurt 
into the eye of God, and through which 
God gazes back into the soul, will look out 
upon ever broadening fields of duty. The 
spiritual energies of the soul, which have 
barely commenced their being in the present 
stage of destiny, and which lift us highest 
toward kinship with God, will open visions 
of Jehovah unspeakably more glorious than 
Moses caught from Sinai. If in forty days 
of imperfect spiritual vision of God, the 
natural face of Moses so shone like the sun 
that the eyes of the people could not endure 
the reflected brightness, what shall be the 
glory of our spiritual faces after we have 
gazed for endless ages upon the very throne 
of God? 

Go on up the heights of the future as far 
as you have come out of the depths of the 

96 



Did God Make Man? 



past, and you reach the second stage in the 
destiny of the soul. But stop not there; 
go still on through other eternities to yet 
dizzier heights that steepen as they rise, 
until you have passed through innumerable 
other equal stages in the advancing destiny 
of the soul, and having put these unnum- 
bered stages all in one, start on afresh with 
this infinite combination as the new unit of 
measurement, and you will find before you 
still more dizzy slopes that lead up towards 
the summitless heights of destiny. And if 
God shall have brought us thither on the 
upward scale of destiny, will he then 
remove his hand? 

If man made God, the destiny of the soul 
is in the clods ; but if God made man, the 
soul will find its destiny in the bosom of 
the infinite. 

Which will the human race accept, — the 
philosophy of agnosticism or the philosophy 
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? 

I have traveled northward on a swiftly 
speeding train as the sun hung low in the 
horizon. Trees and telegraph poles sped 

97 



Did Man Make God, or 



rapidly to the south, but the sun kept even 
with the train. Fields of corn and pastures 
of green went flying southward, but the sun 
swept northward in majestic movement with 
the progress of the train. Towns and vil- 
lages hurried by, and the sun disappeared 
from sight behind the opposing walls; but 
when the train reached again the open 
highway, the sun was still in line. We 
plunged into long black tunnels, and our 
traveling companion was lost in the dark- 
ness, but scarcely had we emerged from 
night into the light of day ere the sun shot 
his beams athwart our track. It requires 
a fast train to outrun the sun. 

Nineteen centuries ago the Gospel ap- 
peared on the horizon of human history. 
The train of the world's progress sweeps 
down through the centuries, but the Gospel 
keeps in sight. Yonder flies backward the 
Roman Empire, with its power, pomp and 
magnificence, but the Gospel keeps in line. 
Yonder through the black tunnels of the 
dark ages the Gospel disappears from view, 
but as the train of progress emerges from 

98 



Did God Make Man? 



this night of centuries, the first sight that 
greets the eye of the world is the Gospel, 
even with the march of history. Yonder 
go the nations of modern Europe in their 
flight into the past, but the Gospel remains 
abreast the train. Yonder go the men of 
destiny, hurrying backward into oblivion, 
but the Gospel, leaving them behind, keeps 
pace with the train. Yonder go the great in- 
fidels of history. I see Hume, loaded down 
with his argument against miracles, plung- 
ing past into obscurity. I see Voltaire, 
who thought the open grave of Christianity 
was just in sight, — there he goes into the 
past, chasing his vagaries among the 
shadows of oblivion. I see Thomas Paine, 
the patriot and the scoffer, — yonder he flies 
with his **Age of Reason*' to join the 
armies of the obsolete. And yonder — can 
it be? — yes, there goes Robert Ingersoll, 
with his witty lectures on Ghosts and Skulls 
and Gods, stumbling ov-er his ''Mistakes of 
Moses" into the deep grave of the past, 
from which no Gabriel of future history 
will ever call him forth to tender memories. 



99 



Did Man Make God? 



But lo, what is this I behold, still blazing 
gloriously on the ever changing horizon of 
advancing history? It is the Sun of Right- 
eousness, the undying Gospel, still abreast 
the forefront of the train of human progress. 
Whoever or whatever undertakes to out- 
run the Gospel of Jesus Christ must measure 
footsteps with the Eternal God. 



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